I took this next picture simply by turning around--yep--that's how close we are to the road, and I really can't convey in the absence of a wide angle lens, just how much traffic there was. It was pulled over, crawling past--an elk jam in park ranger parlance. The shear numbers and obvious health of these massive animals attests to a very productive environment--and yet we have traffic jams everywhere in the park, and popular sites like the Old Faithful Geyser look like county fairs with thousands of spectators, driving, crapping, peeing and creating mountains of disposal wrappers, cans and the general refuse of a typical car trip.

Its a tremendous irony to realize that the complex of hotels, gift shops, gas stations and restaurants surrounding Old Faithful occupies a larger footprint than what has been described as the ANWR oil recovery complex--all this in an "environmentally-sensitive" national park.

None of this is new to me--almost every power plant I have every visited is surrounded by woodland busting at the seams with all sorts of varied wildlife. The Bruce Peninsula nuclear power plant on the shores of the Georgian Bay is actually a de facto wildlife perservation area the place is so lousy with deer and other critters.

--> This is Grissom island, named after Gus Grissom the astronaut. It is actually in the Long Beach harbor near Los Angeles. Looks nice right?

Its an oil rig.

There are four of these islands stretched out along the coast, pumping oil from the sea floor and looking for all the world like some billionaire's ocean retreat. The lovely bunny used to frequent the beaches in this area as a young woman, and she had no idea there were 40,000 oil wells all around here. Seal beach, Huntingdon beach--the scene of countless real life dramatizations of Beach Blanket Bingo--all in the middle of essentially an industrial complex.

When are you going to realize that barack-o-bama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are lying to you?

H/T Varifrank